Bayern produce 4.58 expected goals, hits the woodwork twice and comes away with a point

Sixty seconds. That is how long the match lasted for anyone who thought the WWK Arena was a formality: a mistake by Neuer coming out, Robin Fellhauer takes advantage, 1-0 Augsburg from a chance worth 0.398.

What happened over the following ninety minutes is the reason this column exists.

The dominance, in numbers

Bayern finished with 4.58 expected goals against 1.96. They carried eighteen balls into the opposition box against six. They kept a PPDA of 7.3 against 23.8, meaning they pressed three times as intensely. They shot twenty-nine times.

And they finished two points off the top instead of level, because the match ended 2-2.

Harry Kane, 1.78 expected goals and no goals

This is where the evening becomes almost comical.

Kane shot eight times for 1.78 expected goals in total, more than the entire Augsburg side produced in the first sixty minutes. In the 13th minute he missed a header worth 0.449. In the 49th he hit the post from 0.544, meaning from a position where you score more than one time in two. In the 78th he had a shot worth 0.489 saved.

Three chances that together were worth 1.48 goals: statistically, a goal and a half. None of them went in.

In the 82nd minute Gnabry joined in too, with the biggest chance of the whole match, 0.661, which ended on the second post of the evening. Two pieces of woodwork in thirty-three minutes, from finishes worth 1.2 goals combined.

Bayern's two goals were scored by Saibari in the 55th from 0.457 and Nathaniel Brown in the 80th from 0.478. That is: the team scored the two half-goal chances and missed all four others of the same value. It is not pure bad luck, it is an evening where the coin always landed on the same side.

Augsburg did their part, and even missed the big one

Careful not to tell this as a robbery and nothing more. Augsburg scored two goals from 0.398 and 0.502: serious finishes, not thirty-metre shots with a deflection. And in the 34th minute Juma Bah had the biggest chance of his team, 0.590, sent wide from a corner. With that one in, today we would be writing about a different match.

The point is another one. The model, replaying this match a thousand times, awards 2.70 points to Bayern and 0.22 to Augsburg. A gap of almost two and a half points compared to the 1-1 of real points: it is the widest of the whole round, across the five leagues.

The paradox that continues

Before the break we wrote that Bayern are the team that dominates more than anyone in Europe and that in the middle of that dominance they had put in a 0-0 at Schalke with twenty-two box entries against zero.

A month later, same story in a different outfit: 4.58 expected goals, two posts, two points dropped. Bayern have scored 16 goals in five matchdays from 17.90 produced, and they remain the team with the best football in the league and with a table that does not say so: 11 points, two behind Dortmund, who in the meantime drew 2-2 at home with Werder after producing 2.62 against 0.85.

At the top of the Bundesliga, right now, there are two teams that have left almost everything they built on the road. Sooner or later one of the two will start cashing in, and the league will change face in three weeks.

T.L.

The match-by-match verdict is in the Meritometro. For those who want the models and not the headlines, there is the Nerd Zone.